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I don’t expect you to know the mathematics involved, but can you show us that you at least have a conceptual idea of why physicists say there was no time before the Big Bang?

Originally Posted by 6days

Sure...SOME secular physicists propose 'no time' (and a variety of other explanations) because they start with the conclusion and invent explanations / rescue devices trying to make evidence that their beliefs. (Cold whoosh, a bounce inside a black hole, multiverse, eternal inflation, ETC)

A prominent secular cosmologist says "Either time did not exist before the beginning; somehow time sprang into existence. That’s a notion we have no grasp of and which may be a logical contradiction. The other possibility is that this event which initiated our universe was a violent event in a pre-existing universe" So there you go.... Even secularists suggest that there was an eternal cause.

Do you really think that saying that there are scientists who dispute the Big Bang is the conceptual basis I was asking about? Do you even know what “conceptual basis” means?

Originally Posted by 6days

Science shows our DNA code is the most sophisticated code in existence.

Amazing. Science shows no such thing. We live on a planet that is orbiting the sun – which a very ordinary star in a galaxy containing a hundred billion other stars. And our galaxy is an ordinary one among more than a hundred billion other galaxies that we can see. We haven’t even made it 1% of the way to the nearest star to our sun, yet you make grandiose claims about our DNA being the “most sophisticated code in existence.” So out of more than 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 suns, most having multiple planets, out of which we have visited not even one single other one, somehow you possess the knowledge of how complex the most complex code is among the ten thousand thousand thousand thousand thousand thousand thousand other places codes might exist. This is one of the most silly and presumptuous statements I have ever seen you make.

I repeat:

Originally Posted by redfern

My beliefs are based on my best understanding, but as is true in all science – given convincing evidence that I am wrong, I will change. ARE YOU EQUALLY WILLING TO ADMIT IT WHEN SHOWN AN IMPORTANT BELIEF OF YOURS IS IN ERROR?

Re Big Bang:

Originally Posted by 6days

But, Redfern... IT IS NOT SCIENCE!!!

Hmmm… I could name a dozen Nobel laureates in physics who think it is science. I have numerous physics texts that discuss it. And we could ask the Physics professors at a few dozen of the top universities in the world, (except last time I suggested that approach you started screaming “That is only popular opinion, That is a bandwagon argument!!”)

So who should I listen to, you who makes no claim to being a scientist, yet feels qualified to dictate what is and is not science, or the scientists themselves?

Let me ask about a couple of the items you have in the list you just enumerated. “Dark matter” and “dark energy” – What is it you apparently find objectionable about those terms? Isn’t there real tangible scientific evidence that those terms are addressing? In other words, if technically qualified YEC scientists were to look through the same telescopes and use the same instruments the secular scientists do, would or would not those YEC scientists see the same unexplained deviations from the laws we thought light and gravity would obey?

Originally Posted by 6days

Based on evidence...I assume that the theory of biogenesis is correct. Life only comes from life. Based on evidence and logic I assume the cause was an omnipotent omniscient life.

You have declared that for you the ultimate test for evidence is your religious text. In contrast there is substantial agreement from diverse fields in secular science that the world is vastly older than you claim it is. That is part of the reason so few of the premier scientists accept YEC claims about how old the earth is, and the origin of life.

Originally Posted by 6days

I think what I suggested is that if you are going to use the argument that bad design is evidence against the Creator, then you should also be willing to acknowledge that good design should be considered as evidence for a Creator...That is logical.

Is it logical? Symbolically, if we denote good design as “A’ and intelligent Creator as “B”, then you are asserting that “if not A then not B” implies that “if A then B”. In formal logic the part right after the “if” is known as the hypothesis, and the part after the “then” is known as the conclusion. It is trivially easy to show that your “logic” is fallacious. Using identically the same logic you do, we might assert that “If 6days is not a human (not A) then 6days is not a woman (not B)” implies that “If 6days is a human (A) “then 6days is a woman (B)”. I don’t think you really believe that. (Read “Symbolic Logic", by Irving M Copi, ISBN 0-02-324980-3, for over 300 pages of analysis of formal logic that is vastly more rigorous than your simplistic silliness.)

Originally Posted by 6days

It is not observational that nature can create good wing design.

If you resort to attributing good wing design purely to something God did, then you are jettisoning any pretense of being able to support your claims using science. Remember, if there is even one aspect seen anywhere in nature where nature came up with both a very functional design and somewhere else it came up with a poor design, then that gives answer to your childish question “"If bad design is evidence against an intelligent Creator, then is good design evidence for an intelligent creator?”

I noted:

Originally Posted by redfern

“Synergistic epistasis”....is also a term that you (and Sanford) have long denigrated as just a “rescue” device.

Originally Posted by 6days

I googled 'Sanford' along with 'rescue device' and didn't come up with anything.

Is that reply meant to falsify what I said? Notice I had the quotes around only the word “rescue”, but you searched for “rescue device”. In spite of your failed search, Sanford does use “rescue devices” one time in the copy of his book I have – in Chapter 11. Additionally in the book he uses just the term “rescue” 16 times, each time specifically in speaking of where he thinks genetics has a problem. And he uses the specific phrase “rescue mechanism” 17 times. You say device, he says mechanism, which is why I opted to place the quotes where I did, only around “rescue”.

Originally Posted by 6days

Nobody has said that there are no scenarios when synergistic epistasis is impossible. It MAY have an effect in SOME situations, and is more possible in populations with high birth rates.

Prior to this thread, I found 20 TOL posts from you mentioning synergistic epistasis. Your comments on it made pretty much a one-note song of derision. You referred to it as one of “various models trying to make the evidence fit”, an “unrealistic model”, a "hypothetical solution", it was “trying to explain away the science”, and you said “the data is not consistent with evolutionary beliefs”. Not once did you even suggest that synergistic epistasis was anything more than a hypothetical “rescue device”.

But now, presented with credible evidence that actual examination of the genome matches the predictions of synergistic epistasis, your adamant dissing of it suddenly softens to “Nobody has said that (it) … is impossible.” and “It may have an effect…”.

Originally Posted by 6days

It MAY have an effect in SOME situations

The article examined 3 separate groups of humans. Unless you have other actual genomic studies that contradict this one, the “May have an effect” more truthfully should say “In 100% of the human groups so far analyzed the data was as predicted by synergistic epistasis.”

Originally Posted by 6days

To suggest synergistic epistasis prevents the human genome from continuous long term degeneration is nothing more than rescue device …

I kinda doubt that the researchers who wrote the article just accidentally picked 3 groups that evidenced the genetic traits Kondrashov said would be necessary to counteract the accumulation of VSDMs. You have some reason to think the people of yesteryear were immune to synergistic epistasis, or that our descendants will be?

And I repeat - I would be impressed if you would contact one or more of the authors of the paper whose title I mentioned, and then you and Sanford show them what is wrong.

Originally Posted by 6days

Nothing to do with 'vestigial'. Evolutionists argued a "useless" appendix was evidence for their common ancestry belief system.

In the world of real science, the word “vestigial” is exactly the right word, referring to an organ which no longer performs its original purpose.

Originally Posted by 6days

So, the logical argument that follows from that is a functional appendix is evidence against the common ancestry belief system.

Here you again demonstrate that you are ignoring the previous times when it was pointed out to you that being useless is not a criteria for an organ being vestigial. You simply can’t tolerate admitting that a vestigial organ can still perform a function.

I suggested:

Originally Posted by redfern

If there are fundamental errors in secular science, then wouldn’t it be more productive to demonstrate those failings rather than to form a little side clique that refuses to publish opposing technical papers?

Originally Posted by 6days

Your statement is a bit naive in that journals and magazines cater to a specific audience. They normally don't publish articles that are going to cost them a loss of subscribers.

I won’t presume to know what criteria YEC-oriented journals use to determine whether or not to publish an article. I suspect you may be right in that case – they fear offending their subscribers.

But for me and every scientific colleague I have ever spoken with about the “publish – don’t publish decision”, you are way off-base. If the editor of a physics journal receives an article that the author wants published, the editor will normally glance at the article to make sure it meets some minimum norms expected of any scientific study. Then the editor will ask someone in the scientific community that is familiar with the specific subject area to do a peer review. In my case, I would pretty much ignore anything but the technical content of the article. If the author demonstrated that they were conversant with recent studies in the field, that they followed proper methodologies, and their article added to the corpus of data or understanding on the subject, then to recommend withhold publishing would have the direct effect of intentionally impeding scientific progress. Our objective is to advance scientific progress, not to insulate our readership from new data, even if that data does not match up with prior studies.

Originally Posted by 6days

The secular journals also use circular reasoning when it comes to origins.

“The scientific establishment’s stance is similar to that of a child who forms an exclusive club, one of the stipulations for membership being that all members must be “extremely smart.” The child then includes in the by-laws the statement that all smart people should think that he (the founding member) is always right. Thus, he concludes that those who do not think he is always right are not smart. Then, he proceeds to malign those not in the club based on the idea that they are not smart. And as proof that they are not smart, he states that it is obvious they are unintelligent because they are not members of his club. In reality, his motivation for castigating those outside his club is simply the fact that they disagree with him, which is the same motivation that propels the evolutionary establishment to reject all creation science articles." https://www.apologeticspress.org/apc...9&article=2508

Your relying on yellow journalism speaks volumes about what you will resort to. I hope I never present vomit like the article you just presented in anything I post.

6days did weigh in on the issue, and you ignored.
1. Do you believe that nothing can create everything?
2. The rescue device (explanations without any basis in science, designed to save secular beliefs) of "no time" is rejected by many cosmologists / astrophysicists. The BELIEF IS NOT SCIENCE.

When it comes to physics, you are so far out of your element that I really wonder if there is any point in responding to you.

JR, I have a few minutes free, so let me return briefly to the “no time before Big Bang” question. I will leapfrog over some intermediate steps to what I hope will illustrate the idea. Time is basically the interval between events. If you drive down the road, you pass a city limit sign and then later you pass a different city limit sign. Time is the interval between those two events. Now let me present a corny example – how long does it take me to move my forefinger from touching my nose to touching my right ear. You could watch me, and using a stopwatch measure the time for me to perform that action.

But now we are going to move far back in time and repeat that experiment. Back to the moment the Big Bang “banged”. The Big Bang – kind of an ultimate Black Hole (but not quite) – where everything in the universe is compressed (for lack of a better term) into a dot. There, the end of my nose and my right ear are not just closer that they were in the first experiment, they occupy the same “dot”, along with the Eiffel tower and the beetle hiding under your refrigerator. But if time is the interval between events, how do you measure how long it takes me to move my finger from my nose to my ear? My nose and my ear occupy exactly the same place. I can’t (conceptually) touch one without touching the other at the same instant. There is no time required for my finger to move to my ear, just as there is no time needed for your beetle (now a dot beetle) to visit Alpha Centauri, which (in our current world) is a minimum of 3 million travel years away.

Philosophically, if the only thing in all of existence was one of those city limit signs that you drove past – no pendulums to mark time, no wrist watches, no day/night, no heartbeat – just a sign – then time becomes essentially meaningless. Just like when everything, including that sign, is at the very same dot – the origin we call the Big Bang.

An oft- presented, but useful analogy can be found here on our earth. Tell me where you live, and I know where I live, and with a bit of math I can figure out how far north and then how far east I need to go to get to your front door. Mathematically, it is most accurate if I think of myself as a dot-sized person trying to reach the exact center of your front door. I can do that from anywhere, to anywhere on earth … almost. What if I elect, instead of taking a quick route, to detour with a momentary stop at the South Pole? Remember, I am a “dot”. Suddenly I have a big problem. Standing at the South Pole, the direction to your house is … north. But that is also the direction to Paris, France. And to Mount Saint Helens, and to every other location on the surface of the earth. Maybe you will be tempted to say that I need to go 20 degrees east of the Prime Meridian, but east does not exist for a dot sitting at the South Pole. As a matter of fact, of the 4 prime directions we innately assume exist – north, south, east, and west – for me as a dot at the South Pole only north exists. I have to step every so microscopically off the South Pole before those other three dimensions have any meaning for me at all.

Similarly in the Big Bang. The “origin” of the Big Bang has only one dimension defined, just as only one direction has meaning at the South Pole. For the Big Bang that dimension is forward time. The instant any finite time elapses from the Big Bang, things start to spread out, in directions that simply had no meaning before. Things spread out, and now my nose and ear are spatially separated, and it becomes meaningful to speak of the time to get from one to the other. Time, and space – up/down, left/right, forward and back come into existence the moment the Big Bang “bangs”.

BTW – lots of students are gonna start showing up on campus pretty soon, so my free time is gonna get scarce.

Ya wanna tell that to the people who run those big machines that accelerate thing like electrons and protons? They are acutely aware that when they take something that starts with an astoundingly small mass, like a single proton, that as they accelerate it to near the speed of light, that they literally have to push it with enormous amounts of energy to speed it up just a little bit.

It is this increase in mass that results in a very fast particle undergoing a quick stop to actually turn into two particles. A commonly used and well understood phenomenon in accelerator physics.

JR, I have a few minutes free, so let me return briefly to the “no time before Big Bang” question. I will leapfrog over some intermediate steps to what I hope will illustrate the idea. Time is basically the interval between events. If you drive down the road, you pass a city limit sign and then later you pass a different city limit sign. Time is the interval between those two events. Now let me present a corny example – how long does it take me to move my forefinger from touching my nose to touching my right ear. You could watch me, and using a stopwatch measure the time for me to perform that action.

And yet, there is still a "before" and "after" you put your finger to your nose. More on that in a sec.

But now we are going to move far back in time and repeat that experiment. Back to the *moment the Big Bang “banged”. The Big Bang – kind of an ultimate Black Hole (but not quite) – where everything in the universe is compressed (for lack of a better term) into a dot.

"Time" issue aside for a moment, how do you go from all the matter in our universe in a single point smaller than the period at the end of this paragraph to what we have now into the universe we see today? What caused the "explosion"? Did the matter/energy always exist? If not, where did it come from? It can't have created itself, just like a rock cannot create itself, and it cannot have always existed, just as a fire cannot burn forever without expending all of it's energy. Anyways, "TIME" to go back to the topic at hand...

At the highlighted asterisk above in my quote of your post, I make note that you can't even use language to describe the instant where your supposed Big Bang "banged" without using words that indicate time already in existence. And I assert that it's not possible to do so, because it is an illogical idea, and truth is not illogical.

In addition to that, there would still have been a "before" the "bang" in ANY scenario. Otherwise you would have to assert that it was always "banging", which would imply that the universe was always existing, which is, again, not possible because, as a fire cannot burn forever, neither can a "bang" go on forever without expending all of the fuel it is using in order to "bang," and thus would have stopped "banging" untold eons before it did.

The whole idea of the universe ing into existence is an illogical notion, because to assert that it came into existence on it's own, you would also have to assert that it also always existed (in some form or another, which leads to "multiverse"), which is a contradiction. And because of the law of non-contradiction, we know that the universe could not both have always existed AND created itself.

There, the end of my nose and my right ear are not just closer that they were in the first experiment, they occupy the same “dot”, along with the Eiffel tower and the beetle hiding under your refrigerator. But if time is the interval between events, how do you measure how long it takes me to move my finger from my nose to my ear? My nose and my ear occupy exactly the same place. I can’t (conceptually) touch one without touching the other at the same instant. There is no time required for my finger to move to my ear, just as there is no time needed for your beetle (now a dot beetle) to visit Alpha Centauri, which (in our current world) is a minimum of 3 million travel years away.

And yet, your "move" (if we can even call it that at that point, or perhaps we should just call it a shift of attention from your nose to your ear, like when you're looking at one of those stereo optical illusions and the image suddenly pops out at you?) still has a before and after, a sequence.

Philosophically

Would you like to discuss Science? or would you like to discuss Philosophy?

Because the topic is currently about science.

if the only thing in all of existence was one of those city limit signs that you drove past – no pendulums to mark time, no wrist watches, no day/night, no heartbeat – just a sign – then time becomes essentially meaningless. Just like when everything, including that sign, is at the very same dot – the origin we call the Big Bang.

An oft- presented, but useful analogy can be found here on our earth. Tell me where you live, and I know where I live, and with a bit of math I can figure out how far north and then how far east I need to go to get to your front door. Mathematically, it is most accurate if I think of myself as a dot-sized person trying to reach the exact center of your front door. I can do that from anywhere, to anywhere on earth … almost. What if I elect, instead of taking a quick route, to detour with a momentary stop at the South Pole? Remember, I am a “dot”. Suddenly I have a big problem. Standing at the South Pole, the direction to your house is … north. But that is also the direction to Paris, France. And to Mount Saint Helens, and to every other location on the surface of the earth. Maybe you will be tempted to say that I need to go 20 degrees east of the Prime Meridian, but east does not exist for a dot sitting at the South Pole. As a matter of fact, of the 4 prime directions we innately assume exist – north, south, east, and west – for me as a dot at the South Pole only north exists. I have to step every so microscopically off the South Pole before those other three dimensions have any meaning for me at all.

Similarly in the Big Bang. The “origin” of the Big Bang has only one dimension defined, just as only one direction has meaning at the South Pole. For the Big Bang that dimension is forward time. The instant any finite time elapses from the Big Bang, things start to spread out, in directions that simply had no meaning before. Things spread out, and now my nose and ear are spatially separated, and it becomes meaningful to speak of the time to get from one to the other. Time, and space – up/down, left/right, forward and back come into existence the moment the Big Bang “bangs”.

BTW – lots of students are gonna start showing up on campus pretty soon, so my free time is gonna get scarce.